The Chief Secretary's fortunate arrival, however, rescued the devoted fair one from the Dean's scientific ardor; for Mr. Meek was a great personage in the chief circles of Dublin. Any ordinary manner, in comparison with Mr. Downie Meek's, would be as linsey-woolsey to three-pile velvet! There was a yielding softness, a delicious compliance about him, which won him the world's esteem, and pointed him out to the Cabinet as the very man to be “Secretary for Ireland.” Conciliation would be a weak word to express the suave but winning gentleness of his official dealings. The most frank of men, he was unbounded in professions, and if so elegant a person could have taken a hint from so humble a source, we should say that he had made his zoological studies available and imitated the cuttle-fish, since when close penned by an enemy he could always escape by muddying the water. In this great dialectic of the Castlereagh school he was perfect, and could become totally unintelligible at the shortest notice.
After a few almost whispered words to his hostess, Mr. Meek humbly requested to be presented to Mr. Cashel. Roland, who was then standing beside Miss Kennyfeck, and listening to a rather amusing catalogue of the guests, advanced to make the Secretary's acquaintance. Mr. Downie Meek's approaches were perfect, and in the few words he spoke, most favorably impressed Cashel with his unpretentious, unaffected demeanor.
“Are we waiting for any one, Mr. Kennyfeck?” said his spouse, with a delicious simplicity of voice.
“Oh, certainly!” exclaimed her less accomplished husband; “Sir Andrew and Lady Janet MacFarline and Lord Charles Frobisher have not arrived.”
“It appears to me,”—a favorite expression of his Lordship, with a strong emphasis on the pronoun,—“it appears to me,” said Lord Kilgoff, “that Sir Andrew MacFarline waits for the tattoo at the Royal Barrack to dress for dinner;” and he added, somewhat lower, “I made a vow, which I regret to have broken to-day, never to dine wherever he is invited.”
“Here they come! here they come at last,” cried out several voices together, as the heavy tread of carriage-horses was heard advancing, and the loud summons of the footman resounded through the square.
Sir Andrew and Lady Janet MacFarline were announced in Mr. Pearse's most impressive manner; and then, after a slight pause, as if to enable the company to recover themselves from the shock of such august names, Lord Charles Frobisher and Captain Foster.
Sir Andrew was a tall, raw-boned, high-cheeked old man, with a white head, red nose, and a very Scotch accent, whose manners, after forty years' training, still spoke of the time that he carried a halbert in the “Black Watch.” Lady Janet was a little, grim-faced, gray-eyed old lady, with a hunch, who, with a most inveterate peevishness of voice and a most decided tendency to make people unhappy, was the terror of the garrison.
“We hae na kept ye waitin', Mrs. Kannyfack, I humbly hope?” said Sir Andrew.
“A good forty minutes, Sir Andrew,” broke in Lord Kilgoff, showing his watch; “but you are always the last.”